Rookie mobster Michael Corleone, in Mario Puzo’s book “The Godfather,” is sent in exile from New York to hide out in Sicily. In the resulting Academy Award-winning movie, director Francis Ford Coppola chose the tiny village of Savoca – population 89 – as the location shoot for those old world scenes starring Al Pacino. Many of them were filmed over a six-week period on the patio of Bar Vitelli, Savocaa’s small, cliff-side café near the location of the church in which Corleone marries Apollonia Vitelli – the daughter, in the story, of the cafés owner.
